If you’re not familiar with the concept of “crush” videos, they’re porn created for a certain brand of fetishist who get off on hot girls stomping on small animals. I’d like to think Danny Masterson is into them, don’t ask me why. In any case, two Florida fetish models recently pleaded not guilty to animal cruelty charges in connection with a series of crush and barnyard porn videos they made for a website that… you know what? A website whose name I’m not going to mention. I’ll take a pass on that Google traffic, since we’ve already got “Florida Barnyard Porn.”

Stephanie Hird, 29, [pictured] a South Florida native who lives in Arkansas, was arrested while trying to board a plane at Miami International Airport, police said. She was charged with five felony counts of cruelty to animals.

Her arrest comes less than two weeks after authorities charged another model, Sara Zamora, 28, with eight felony counts of animal cruelty for allegedly decapitating chickens and beating rabbits as part of an animal torture sex fetish video, a story first reported by The Miami Herald.

Both pleaded not guilty this week. The videos were reportedly produced by Adam Redford, a man whom multiple news reports identify as, I shit you not, “a local fishing boat captain.”

Hird is alleged to have crushed live fish with “her hands and feet,” according to an arrest warrant filed in court. “The fish struggle and gasp while slowly being crushed to death on an ice cooler. Ms. Stephanie Hird exposes her crotch area and talks to the fish about the killing while they are being crushed.”

Last year, deputies arrested Redford for a rabbit-killing video filmed on his Estero property. The Naples Daily News this week reported that in the video, a woman – at point-blank range – shoots two tied-down rabbits with an air rifle. The bleeding bunnies squealed and squirmed before dying of their wounds.

In Lee County court documents, Hird was named as the woman who shot the rabbits, though she was never charged.

In the Miami-Dade case, Hird is also accused of attacking rats, according to an arrest warrant filed by prosecutor Jason Pizzo and Detective Mario Fernandez.

The model is also alleged to have shot a rat repeatedly while the animal is “in obvious pain.” According to the warrant, she then sets fire to a pile of the mortally wounded animals.

In Zamora’s case, gropes a man’s genitals with her left hand while “repeatedly cutting a chicken’s neck using hedge clippers with her right.” In others, she posed “in a sexy outfit” after hacking off the head of another screaming bird, or she beat chickens to death with a wooden stick. She also karate-chopped the necks of several rabbits as they howled in pain, police said, then admitted to killing them. [MiamiHerald]

And here I thought “choking the chicken” was just an expression. I also never realized that rabbits could “howl,” but I’ll take their word for it because that sounds horrifying.

Hird, incidentally, had previously appeared in a segment of TLC’s Strange Sex, about giant fetishists.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide what’s more a hallmark of a crumbling civilization, that a fishing boat captain has taken to filming models killing small animals to make ends meet, or that there’s a television channel called “The Learning Channel” that airs shows about child beauty pageants and fetish porn.

My parents had chickens for years, and the routine way to slaughter them was old-fashioned chopping block plus axe. I woulda done that in a bikini if I knew there were that many freaks prepared to pay to watch. I’d call it Barnyard Porn Lite. No torture, but the end result is the same. Give me your money.

I prefer animals to be (a) slaughtered humanely, (b) by other people, (c) where I can’t see or hear it, and (d) then be wrapped nicely in plastic and sent to the grocery store where I can purchase their dead flesh to eat.

So is there any indication as to the defendants’ strategy? Is the non-guilty plea just to give time to hammer out a plea deal or are they making a defense based on facts or law or some sort of constitutional claim. I have to imagine claiming “that wasn’t me killing those animals on tape” is not going to go very far unless there is some sort of crush film stunt double, which must be the most depressing job on Earth.